Film, television, and new media theory has long challenged accepted notions and distinctions having to do with truth, fiction, realism, and documentary. It has taught us that our reality is mediated and constructed and that the memories we inherit, the places we inhabit, and the identities we assume are permeated by incongruous histories and meanings. Can the study of moving images now help us navigate and act in spaces where there is no agreement on the state of things or things stated and the labels “truth” and “fake” seem to have little to do with correspondence to facts or coherence?
The Twelfth Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television Studies at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television is devoted to exploring the moving image and its history in relation to “fake news,” “alternative facts,” blatant fallacies, demonstrable lies, and siloed information feeds.
Presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Challenging, frustrating, encouraging, or embracing the passion for telling lies, revealing truths, unmasking falsehoods, being authentic, or flaunting affectation in and through moving images
The truth and post-truth of cinematic space: archeological layers of myth, memory, counter-memory, and history; the place and its image; unlikely cities and states; disorientation and the any-space-whatever; impossible maps
The temporality and history of post-truth; Orwellian motion pictures; the moving image in totalitarian regimes and in illiberal democracies; post-truth as continuing—and as a reaction to—cultural studies; reactionary post-modernism and identity politics
Moving images that embrace contradiction and the unattainability of a single truth; puzzle texts and complex narratives that exceed comprehension; paradoxical stories
Constructions of identity that are ambiguous and implausible; monstrous amalgamations; perverse subjectivities; heterogeneity posing as unity; noble lies
Art and creativity as misreading and as distortion; reality imitating art, fantasy, and satire; #NotTheOnion; Deleuze’s and Nietzsche’s powers of the false; virtuous counterfeiters, colluding investigators, insincere journalists, and manipulative historians and memoirists; cruel honesty; anti-Platonism
Theorizations of fiction, being and seeming, relativism and perspectivism, skepticism, orders of simulacra, realism, the index, ideology, “the creative treatment of actuality,” and authenticity
